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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 A RHETORIC OF METAFICTION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Beth Ann Boehm, A.B., M.A * * * * * The Ohio State University 1987 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor James Phelan Professor John Muste Professor Morris Beja Adviser Department of English Copyright by Beth Ann Boehm 1987 To My Parents, Edward and Bernadette Boehm ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would especially like -to thank Professor James Phelan, whose critical insight and guidance throughout my project, and indeed, throughout my graduate career, have been invaluable. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Professors John Muste and Morris Beja, for their encouragement and suggestions. VITA November 16, 1957................ Born--Muncie, Indiana May, 1980......................... A.B., Georgetown University Washington, D.C. June, 1984 ........................ M.A., Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio PUBLICATIONS "Educating Readers: Creating New Expectations in Lost in the Funhouse." Reading Narrative: Form. Ethics, Ideology. Ed. James Phelan. To be published by Ohio State University Press, 1987. FIELDS OF STUDY Twentieth-Century British and American Literature Nineteenth-Century British Literature Prose Fiction and Narrative Theory Rhetoric and Composition iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iii VITA..........................................................iv CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION: A RHETORIC OF METAFICTION........... 1 II. DIDACTIC METAFICTION..................................23 Educating Readers: The Pleasures of the Text. 23 Educating Readers: Beyond the Pleasures of the Text........................................ 57 III. THE FOLKTALE: MYTH AND FORM........................ 7 7 The Mythic Consciousness of Robert Coover. 77 The Consciousness of Form......................... 112 IV. METALINGUISTIC DISCOURSE............................ 129 Language as Both Means and End: Willie Masters ’ Lonesome Wife.................. 129 Signs are Signs--And Some of Them are Lies. 154 V. READING READERS: DRAMATIZED NARRATIVE AUDIENCES 172 October Light: The Reader of Common Drugstore Trash............................................. 174 Kiss of the Snider Woman: The Ideologic vs. The Romantic Reader.................................. 190 If on a winter *s night a traveler: The Protean Reader............................................ 206 VI. THE METAFICTIONAL AND THE MIMETIC: REDEFINING REALISM.................................. 226 The Self-Conscious Mimetic Novel: The French Lieutenant’s Woman...............................226 The Realism of Metafiction: Conclusions......... 246 LIST OF REFERENCES........................................ 258 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: A RHETORIC OF METAFICTION Current literary Jargon indicates that post-modern anti-realists write metafiction or anti-novels; these texts seem to resist the usual categories of criticism with their metalinguistic concerns, and their self-reflexive, self- conscious literary structures have, as a current literary handbook puts it, "a puzzled self at the center." Perhaps this preponderance of prefixes indicates that the reader is the self puzzled by the otherness of texts as diverse in style, form, and substance as those from authors like Barth, Gass, Barthelme, Coover, Borges, Calvino, Fowles, and even pre-post-modern writers like Cervantes, Fielding, and Sterne. Critics and readers alike often respond negatively to metafictional texts, usually arguing that the reader must "dig too hard" to make sense of the works. Typical of the critics of metafiction is Cynthia Ozick, who in "Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means," suggests that this type of "'experimental' writing is unreadable. It fails because it is neither intelligent nor interesting. Without seriousness it cannot be interesting and without mastery it will never be intelligent." At the 1 2 heart of Ozick’s complaint, however, is the assumption that fiction should be about "life," that it should enable us to "enter a land, a society, a people, and to penetrate into the whole lives of human beings." Taking the high moral road, Ozick suggests that experimental writers have abandoned their responsibility to readers by not anchoring their fiction in the "art of the didactic"; suggesting that fiction should "educate its readers in its views of what it means to be a human being," Ozick asks "to which black- humorist or parodist would you entrust the whole lives of human beings?"1 Ozick*s response illustrates the problem many readers influenced by the Jamesian view of fiction have with metafiction--a term concisely defined by Patricia Waugh as "fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality."2 The mimetic tradition has created the expectation that fiction be about "life" and that it teach truths about the reality it depicts. Readers steeped in this tradition want to be involved emotionally and morally in a character's situation; they expect, as Ozick says, "a corona of moral purpose" in their fiction.* But as Peter Rabinowitz has suggested in "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences," the more an author "increases our awareness of the novel as art," the more he diminishes our "direct emotional involvement" in his work.* An author who constantly exposes the structures and language which make up his fictions--one who reminds us within the fictional construct that "literature is language, that stories and the places and the people in them are merely made of words as chairs are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth or metal tubes"5--does indeed make it difficult for readers to become emotionally involved in a world constructed from "mere" words. And by performing his own first critical analysis within the text itself, the writer of metafiction makes it difficult for the critic- reader to respond in familiar ways. The most satisfying mimetic fiction, most readers would agree, also defies the reader's expectations and demands a new response, but it does so by respecting, at least in some ways, narrative conventions. Readers agree to enter the world of the narrative, and for the duration of the reading we temporarily consent to the illusion that the text is about "real" people and "real" events; we can-~and do--of course step out of that world whenever we wish to make intellectual and aesthetic observations about those structures, but even an arresting metaphor or a well-turned phrase does not so much remove us from the world of the narrative by reminding us of the text as linguistic construct as much as it makes us see something within the narrative world more clearly. In other words, though we 4 might admire the author’s verbal virtuosity, we see that virtuosity as a means of sustaining or intensifying the realistic illusion of the work, not as an invitation to foreground his role as constructor of a fictional world. The experience of reading metafiction is different from the experience of reading mimetic fiction, in part because we are never allowed to forget that the text before us is a fictional construct, but also because our roles as readers and our attitudes toward literature are redefined by these texts. Instead of viewing the text as a mirror of the "real" world--a product--we must concentrate on the processes involved in constructing and reading that text. Even in novels that retain strong ties to mimetic fiction, as for example does The French Lieutenant* a Woman> our involvement is never only in the narrative world of the text, but always also in the process by which that text is constructed. Fowles’ novel, for instance, is in many ways an imitation of a Victorian novel, which itself is generally an imitation of some non-fictional genre, such as autobiography or history; but because The French Lieutenant^ Woman uses metafictional devices, the reader is never allowed to forget